


Carry No Key

by garnettrees



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King, KING Stephen - Works
Genre: Dark Tower References, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Hopeless Romantic But Not A Very Nice One, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, M/M, Night Terrors, Past Drug Addiction, Post-Canon Fix-It, Recovery, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier is a Little Shit, Richie Tozier's Internalized Homophobia, Sleep Deprivation, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Suicidal Thoughts, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), bad life choices
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:20:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25608775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garnettrees/pseuds/garnettrees
Summary: "Go then, there are other worlds than these."-Jake Chambers, "Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger"Sometimes, when a Beam diverges, the separate branches are so weak and insupportable that they inevitably collapse back together. Richie Tozier is on a journey to repair the Path of the Turtle, Way of the Bear-- and save the man he loves-- whether he knows it or not.(-Or- Reddie in a Dark Tower context that no one asked for.)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I started this in January (a million years ago) and have been pretty much switching back and forth between it and the next chapter of All the Wrong Places for the past four or five months. This got finished first and, while I'm not sure I have the rhythm for Reddie, I am physically incapable of letting 74 kb of fix just sit on my hard drive. ^_~ 
> 
> Trigger Warnings (chapter specific): Internalized homophobia, the end of IT: Chapter 2 should be its own warning, suicidal ideation, references to the death of aging parents.
> 
> There's some incorporation of novel canon here, as well as spoilers for another Stephen King novel (aside from the Dark Tower series-- check the end notes of chapter one if you need to know which one).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started this in January (a million years ago) and have been pretty much switching back and forth between it and the next chapter of All the Wrong Places for the past four or five months. This got finished first and, while I'm not sure I have the rhythm for Reddie, I am physically incapable of letting 74 kb of fix just sit on my hard drive. ^_~ 
> 
> Trigger Warnings (chapter specific): Internalized homophobia, the end of IT: Chapter 2 should be its own warning, suicidal ideation, references to the death of aging parents.
> 
> There's some incorporation of novel canon here, as well as spoilers for another Stephen King novel (aside from the Dark Tower series-- check the end notes of chapter one if you need to know which one).

"When I die-- it doesn't matter how long from now, or what that hack coroner says-- _this_ will be what killed me."

Richie's father had spoken those words, staring down at the obnoxiously green astroturf rolled out over his wife's grave. Richie can recall the moment with almost unbearable clarity, standing beside his father and staring up through the blur of saline and perpetual thick lenses at the pale Modesto sky. The detail is uncomfortable, especially for one who now knows so many of his memories were unwillingly washed to near illegibility, but the way his spine stiffened in guilt is still quite real to him. Echoed and amplified to crushing weight, in the even more unbearable Present. He'd been thinking about those springy tufts of fake grass when Wentworth had spoken, about asinine men in khaki shorts wandering amidst the flat plaques and occasional genuine headstones with their nine irons. The world's most morbid game of mini-golf-- nothin' but chucks here at REST **FORE!** EVER cemetery and driving range. The silence between father and son had been as thick and plastic as the strip of false verdancy before them; the words which suddenly manifested themselves were so raw the younger Tozier did not at first think his father capable of uttering them. Richie's own tongue had developed the same consistency as the caked and waxy flesh now thankfully shut away-- something of a saving grace, since it temporarily stoppered his constant editorializing of of the world around him. His mind did not settle (broadcast fully functional, signal clear and increasingly hysterical, yes siree!) but his bleak comedic observations writhed and died in his mouth, like worms caught out on the asphalt once the rain has petered away. _'The worms go in, the worms go out…'_ , as the old playground rhyme once ran.

The faux-bronze marker for that particular grave had not been delivered yet. If Richie had not seen them plant the over-priced casket himself, this spot would be meaningless. Nothing to differentiate it from a poorly disguised hole in the ground; to declare 'MARGARGET TOZIER, _wife of, mother of_ , and all that jazz. Not even a pathetic collection of dye-cut construction paper letters like the ones the nursing home put outside the cubicle door ('Maggie T.') like they were running a lame-ass, rinky-dink kindergarten. As though that fucking helped when your mother 

( _who may often have smelled-- at least since your personal memory began-- of sharp top-shelf liquors beneath her Lancome perfume, who many have had vodka flowing in her deepening desiccated veins, but was always 'so put together' and _never_ a sloppy drunk, for shame!_ ) 

was sitting there in a diaper and couldn't remember how to hold a spoon, let alone her own name. 

Beyond the shock of hearing Wentworth Tozier speak-- so guttural, so beyond the normal tone of cocktail congeniality-- there had come a of embarrassment which left Richie momentarily disgusted with himself and the way his own grief was manifesting. Sadness boiled in gallows' humor, garnished with facetiousness because it didn't matter that the world didn't give a damn as long as you didn't give one in return. The feeling crested with equal brevity, collapsing into resentment (he disliked being coerced any deeper into self-loathing than his normal waist-high stance) and then finally to a sort helpless child's confusion. Panic, almost, when he realized the seventy-something man beside him-- the pillar of composure and orthodonture and 'Richie, comedy is not a _career_ '-- was crying and coughing. The tears were fat, more viscous than Richie's own, which had been blinked away. They left trails in the sun, following lunatic patterns as they caught in the wrinkled grooves of an aged face. The hacking sound was faint, but it rattled with phlegm and hysteria, and it was then that he realized Wentworth was only coughing because he could not chuckle. Not even bleakly, ruefully, at the awful punchline death and dementia reserved for its audience-- 'for your eyes only', once every synapse had withered, every moment had been stained with piss and sweat and a gaze full of awful, animal confusion. What died in the end was a husk, a house only sporadicly tenanted and then downright haunted, which you mourned as you had been mourning the fading _personhood_ all along.  
And _you_ , folks who didn't even pay to see this shit-show (who would?), get to live with it. Thanks for the memories!  
Joke's on you.

Now, more than two decades later, Richie's eyes are full of tears and quarry water, face turned up to a relentlessly blue Maine morning, and there is no half-assed, smart-aleck commentary in his normally racing brain. Just his father's words-- the only exact sentence he can remember hearing from the man, aside from the hallmark objection to comedy and 'there's a lot of money in teeth, son'. The phrase weighs in, weighs _home_ , grinding against his bones like the detritus of IT's lair and the mortar of the Niebolt Street house should have done. 

There is sane and decent terrestrial sunlight on his face, clean air in his lungs. The perpetual odor of the quarry is practically undetectable after the putrescence of the sewer and the charnel house beneath the cistern. He is surrounded by the (remaining) people who have loved him through the worst and known him at his youthful, uncomplicated best. People who had been stolen from him, excised from waking memory in a terrible sort of mental rapine. He feels more genuinely connected to other human beings in this moment than he has in the last three decades. An impossible camaraderie, awkward only because it makes one so vulnerable-- the sort of thing he would have mocked with resolute cynicism just days ago. Yet there's no room in him for gratitude-- or at least, no capacity to _feel_ it--

( _'Not much capacity in a spoon, is there, dickwad?'_ )

and nothing but the most peripheral, idle recognition that Ben and Bev are affirming their victory and their private mutual orbit within the larger

( _but ever diminishing-- tough luck, Stan; sucks harder than your mom, Eddie_ )

sphere of the Losers. Does Richie resent them? He doesn't know-- the sliver of decency beneath the man-child lacquer hopes not-- but, in truth, he just feels nerveless. Empty. Like someone came in with an ice-cream scoop, one so cold it smoked at room temperature, and took it bluntly to his viscera. Nothing bleeds

( _not like Eddie, blood so vital and from such organic depths that it came out almost more black than red, leaking not just from without but from within, gagged up to drip down his chin like licorice filling_ )

inside Richie, bizarrely cauterized by frigidity, flesh yanked away in great indiscriminate gobs. He sits, a forty year old man in a quarry clearly sign-posted against swimming and other shenanigans, looking at his friends and wondering if this is how his mother felt, listless in her too-large nightgown and the bed she no longer knew how to leave. Once or twice, on so-called 'good days', she had gazed on him with this uncomfortably tenacious _blankness_ and said, without inflection, 'You. I know **you**.' But she never got any further than that and Richie's numb explanations, even if they managed coherence, always escaped her diminishing attention span. Back to square one.

The only thing _alive_-- quivering, pumping blood on a fast-track to nowhere-- within Richie Tozier now is a desperate desire not to have made it this far. The sense-memory of Eddie's already cooling body seems to have branded itself against his chest and arms; the dampness of sweat and styling gel and sewer-moisture that could not completely hide the delicate slide of hair against his fingers. He wants to be down there in the dark with Eddie, the final void where you don't float but sink. He may be disgusted with himself for the cliche, for the raw sentimentality and the truth therein, but all the internal mockery in the world can't change simple fact. (No one is more jeering or intolerant of Richie, of course, than himself.) Suicide is, besides, not an unknown visitant in his life or his family. If he is not above very nearly expiring in a dirty bathroom coated in the negligent despair of an accidental overdose, then dying in the virulent half-light of the sub-sewer with his body shielding Eddie's might be a step up. 

( _"He's always been a fragile boy. Delicate. I told you and told you!" guilt gibbers in the voice of Sonia Kaspbrak, all decay and obese vowels. "You **filthy** , rude little savage-- not good enough for my boy, oh no! You broke him, you _ruined_ him, you dirty little freak. Just like I knew you would! And then you left him down there in the dark like trash…"_)

Richie's hands fly up to block his ears, nails biting into his temples while he curls protectively in upon himself. Predictably, his glasses-- already cracked and perched precariously-- fall straight into the water, sinking down past an entangled Ben-and-Beverly marked by the drifting whips of red and ebony. ' _The dirt and the dark_ ', Tozier thinks, longing for a beam of fire through the brain to bring all the house lights down, ' _The filth._ '

His mind returns again to his father, worrying the memory like a sick little rat. Strange, absent creature, Wenworth Tozier; a being cut from the business wear section of the Sears catalogue, who never the less occasionally responded to Richie's 'British Guy' with an astonishingly bad accent of his own. One Christmas, Dr. Tozier gifted 'Mags' (and he was the only one allowed to call her that) with a sapphire necklace, which she delightedly asked him to assist her with. Both adults had quickly forgotten Richie's presence in the process of sweeping her hair aside, engaged in a casual affection that never extended beyond their own sphere. ("Yee-uck!" shouted their audience of one, the perpetual reminder that children were not conducive to the sort of lives showcased in 'Better Homes and Gardens'.) His parents fought like cats and dogs sometimes. Drunk, Richie's mother had a jealous streak as red as the lipstick stains she claimed to spot on her husband's collar; he said she nagged him, that she gave him no peace. Yet there they'd be at the kitchen table, looking at each other as if neither the casserole nor their son were of any consequence. 

Just seven months after she passed (an odd number-- did he round up from six, hoping to allay suspicion?), Wentworth himself was dead. That self-same hack coroner ruled it an accident. Just an elderly gentleman who probably should have stopped driving himself long before and, while the levels of medication in the deceased were slightly elevated, such would easily be explained if he (poor eyesight again) simply forgetfully took another pill. Side effects did include nausea, blurred vision, and confusion. There you have it, a perfect storm. While there was an inquest from the life insurance company, the verdict held (ah, Dad, you wily old fox!) and Richie-- still batting mostly zeroes in the poorly lit bars of the LA outskirts-- inherited the cushion that allowed him to keep chugging until the day his luck finally, miraculously, began to change. 

( _'This dream you're chasing is such a gamble,' said the distant relatives, all frustration and cloying sympathy because their well-meaning hovering had produced no financial windfall.  
'Gambling is the purest fucking type of risk,' says the imagined voice of adult Eddie, who apparently analyzed such things. 'If what you risk reveals what you value, then I guess we know how I rate with the ol' Trashmouth.'_)

' _Oh, G-d, that's not true,_ ' Richie thinks. He'd pry this earnest desperation out of himself, as if that might salvage his non-existent self respect, but the thoughts come in a wave all the same. 'Tell the truth,' Bill's mom used to say, eyeing them all as if they'd been up to something horrible long before they actually were, 'and shame the devil.' ' _Eds, I missed you every moment I forgot your fucking name. That's so wet, so soppy I could die, so come back and roast me for it, Spaghetti. Triple-dog-dare you, douchebag.'_

Presently, the lovebirds-- safe and happy, no shame in _that_ sort of boyhood idolatry-- finally surface. Bev makes some wistful comment about Eddie that Ben and Bill elaborate on and which, though he gives some vague response, Richie completely ignores. He owes Bill a sock in the kisser with about three decades of interest, but something like love (certainly not prudence) stays his hand. Or perhaps he's just too tired to move, to do anything but sit and hope the rock under his boney ass absorbs him somehow. Mike, who has stayed silently nearest to Richie all this time, moves forward. Careful, deliberate; a man used to dealing with creatures liable to bolt. They all seem to interpret Tozier's distance as some sort of belated invitation, congregating around him in a tangle of blurry limbs. They are warm and real and they do love him, he recognizes, somewhere past the thirteen year-old boy writhing within, wailing and swearing to wake the dead. Richie has forgotten whole swaths of his life but geeze, what a loud-mouthed little shit. The crack of Bill's small fist against his own cheekbone echoes in his mind, followed by all the surreptitious sniffling he did in the neighbor's begonias, waiting for Mrs. K's bedroom light to go out. Forgive me, don't let her be right; forgive me, because you're so brave but I still should have protected you, and boys who are careless don't deserve nice things. I hurt you to help you-- oh, G-d, did you scream!-- so how am I any different from her?

Because he's bound to the remaining Losers just as they are to him, Richie searches his hollow being and produces a quip about his glasses, about not recognizing the people anchoring him in place. If only love were as simple and straightforward as hatred or indifference. Instead, its a cat's cradle of positive and negative, a dark-bright that has devoured more worlds then any eon-old being can claim. The others laugh and do not (cannot?) associate this final victory with the first time they fled Neibolt, Eddie half-hobbling, half-dragged between Bill and a Richie who stumbled under the weight of sympathetic tears. No one had been left behind then and, while those two sets of circumstances are not exactly aligned, Tozier can't help but attribute it to the disenchantment of adulthood. A child's single-mindedness versus the cost-benefit analysis of the aged. Reality scrapes against his brain, unbearable; the only humor he has in him is an acidic appreciation for how the disaffected amnesiac he was up until a few days ago would view the everlasting mess he is now.  
He's alive, breathing. It feels like a clerical error.

Richie knows without a doubt that, when he dies, _this_ will be what killed him. 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Thomas De Quincey's Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow:  
> "[Our Lady of Darkness] _carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all._ "
> 
> Kudos, comments, and questions about my mental health are always appreciated. (Though the latter are likely unanswerable. ^_~) Feedback serves the Beam.


	2. Path of the Turtle, Way of the Bear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warnings for this chapter: horror imagery, suicidal ideation, references to past drug abuse and recovery. Richie bullshits like it's his job (oh... wait).

_'When I die,_   
_don't bury me at all,_   
_just pickle my bones,_   
_in alcohol.'_

Richie has no idea where _that_ uninspired little ditty came from, but it's been playing in his head on loop for weeks, ever since he returned to LA. He's no stranger to circuitous, possibly (okay, _likely_ ) obsessive thoughts, and he'd be more annoyed with the situation if the jingle wasn't helping to block out something else. He's supposed to make a token effort to break these cycles-- instead, he's been indulging himself, letting the tiny lunatic gnome within wear his mental carpet down to 

( _the sewers, the cistern_ )

fuckin' China in the hopes they'll both simply collapse in exhaustion at some point. You have 'E' gallons, Mr. Tozier, and no spare lives. GAME OVER. 

While he was getting clean-- almost a decade ago, how time flies-- he briefly attended some very expensive, very discrete private therapy. The sobriety he gained mostly stuck, the therapy mostly didn't. ( _'Let's talk about your childhood, Mr. Tozier.' In confusion less faked than it ought to have been, 'Is that the thing with the two wheels and peddles?'_ ) He picked up a few useful tips and one _very_ helpful non-narcotic prescription, while the doctor was at pains to remind him of two vital points. One, the meds were worth very little if not coupled with a conscious effort towards behavior modification ( _'Kinky,' had been Richie's response at the time_ ) and, two, recovery is only ever a present-tense verb. You're always recover _ing_ , ever on guard and mindful, because the drug-of-choice is only a symptom. It's the addictive nature of his personality he has to worry about-- not a disease, precisely, more a chronic health condition like   
( _asthma_ )  
diabetes or a clotting disorder. No moral connotations, just another facet of the self he has to be aware of to stay healthy. 

Richie supposes that paying for a ridiculous piece of interest-laden paper and spending years listening non-comedic monologues about marital problems or potty training or _whatever_ probably entitles you to be right every now and again, but he still thinks that son-of-a-bitch had some _nerve_ to be so spot-on. It's just rude. He'd lodge a complaint, even now, but he can't quite figure out how to frame it in a Yelp review. As has ever been his ADHD-laden MO, he's taking the advice with half an ear.

( _'Are you even listening to me?' Eddie used to ask, gesticulating in motions wider than his actual body, brown eyes searching Richie's glazed expression like a terrier out for rats. Tozier _was_ listening-- or maybe 'paying attention' might have been a better term-- achingly aware of the rage-blush spreading beneath the smaller boy's freckles, of the sheen on cherry-pop lips and the sheer force of personality on display. Panting and drooling would have been more obvious, but not by much. Shortly, the flinging of random objects might begin, because 'the fact you can spit back the last six words I said in no way convinces me you were actually listening, dickweed!'._ )

A week, two weeks, three-- since Derry, since his life resumed and ended after a twenty-seven year hiatus no network would ever approve. This isn't even reboot territory, people, just the unending hell of syndication. Richie Tozier is falling apart, but far too slowly for his own taste and from the inside out. It's like ol' Mrs. K at the grocer's, feeling up the oranges, convinced there was some lurking contagion under the pristine peel.   
( _the worms go in_ )  
He will, at some point, collapse like a dying star or an apple with larva squirming inside. Ben's always on about the careful inspection of antique homes-- sure, it looks solid, but that dry rot can be a bitch.  
( _the worms go out…_ )

It's like the those days he'd wanted to play hookie, long ago. ( _'Come on, Spaghetti, let's walk the train tracks, head to the quarry. My parents aren't in town, let's watch movies and mainline pixie sticks and get minor injuries playing air guitar.'_ ) Richie's high school attendance wasn't always stellar, but it was greatly improved by the strong-arm tactics of his friends. He'd be ready to bolt, only to find himself dragged back to pre-Calc by a less than enthusiastic but dutiful Eddie, or geography with a sternly responsible Stan.

( _What's up with that, Staniel? You ditched, _you_ played truant, took the ultimate French Leave. Do as I say, not as I do, huh? Who the hell are you to act like the boss of me?_ )

He can't stay angry at Stan, no matter the volcanic bubbles of petulance that swell within him from time to time. Not before the letter and certainly not after, too filled with regret for time lost and time forfeited, no matter how noble the man's intentions had been. For nearly three decades, Richie Tozier and the rest of the Losers had wandered through superficially successful lives (fortune he is distantly aware he should be grateful for, even if gratitude isn't really his bag) with holes in their very _selfhood_. Not hollows, like those creepy little nesting dolls, but actual fucking through-and-through holes, like old Looney Tunes characters emerging from a shoot-out seemingly unscathed, drinking water and spilling all over the place. Har-dee-har, look at that swiss cheese asshole. Every inch of his carefully cultivated 'dudebro' masculinity may writhe in agony under the sheer exposure of it all, but Richie missed the Losers  
( _missed **Eddie**_ )  
every fucking day, even when the surface of his mind had been scoured smooth, even when he couldn't have produced a name or detail with a gun pressed to his temple. 

Tozier is willing to give a desultory nod of acknowledgement to the human subconscious but, assuming he could muster the level of belief necessary for souls _in theory_ , he's pretty sure he doesn't have one.   
( _'The only sole I'm interested in is the kind smothered in lemon butter sauce!'_ )  
It's not a big deal, like your parents denying you a 'treat' you never wanted in the first place. For decades, Richie's mom would buy him Peeps every Easter, convinced he waited all year for the seasonal candy. He actually has a pathological hatred for the little marshmallow motherfuckers-- the smell and taste of them made him feel morose, near tears. He's never understood why-- that is, until he hopped on the Derry Midnight Mind-Whammy and remembered the mess he and Eddie once made in the microwave, sticking them through with toothpicks and trying to make them joust. So Richie can't hope that Stan and Eddie have gone on to a better place, even if it's the sort of nice, socially acceptable thought everyone is taught to cling to. He's a one-and-done kind of guy; no light at the end of the tunnel, folks, Elvis has left the building. 

If anything, he's quietly envious of his lost friends. An end to thought and awareness, eternal blackness, would be a thousand times better than the eons-long moments he has disremembered from the Deadlights. (He can feel the horrific impressions of what his mind could not stand to hold, the ebony bleeding up and through layers of white paint.) Certainly it would be better the the slow pulse of grief unfolding in his veins, an ache that already feels old, the way he imagines the dry rot of arthritis must feel. He's no stranger to suicidal ideation, either. The majority of his twenties-- those broke-ass, grimy years of menial jobs and slammed doors and drunken combat tours of local chuckle-huts-- were spent vacillating between neuron-deep despair and a sort of defiant conviction that, if he failed in his ambition, he always had the option to just bug-out. Like that somehow stacked the deck in his favor, the ace of spades in his hip-pocket. Looking back (rarely, rarely, only when he _has_ to) it strikes him as more the attitude of a child playing with a gun they're ' _sure_ ' isn't loaded. 

( _'All guns are loaded,' Mike's grandfather told them once. Now there was one stone-cold, fully-human, _scary_ motherfucker. 'All guns are loaded, even when they're not.'_ )

There's a lot to unpack there, so Richie-- being Richie-- doesn't even touch or directly acknowledge the issues at all. He's aware only of the steady call-and-response of text notifications from the other Losers, a weird electronic whale song, threading its way through his day-to-day activities, striking the high notes. On the back track, he cycles over considerations that if he had just been a little quicker on the uptake, a little faster with the muscle-reflexes, a little more _aware_ of x, y, or z, then he could have taken the hit for Eddie. That would have been preferable, compared to this. A much more desirable, director's cut ending. 

So, Richie has standards, who knew? Straight forward  
( _'looks like Stan couldn't cut it'_ )  
action is out. But life is very chancy, so much so you can make a career out of analyzing the risks. 

( _What **does** that actually entail? Richie still doesn't know. Maybe he should have let Eddie explain. At least then he'd have something mind-numbingly boring to think of while he stares at the ceiling, waiting for the final drop-off into his nightly helping of technicolor viscera, of terror so deep and unwholesome it defies the very notion of screaming._)

There are car accidents and kitchen accidents and shower accidents (of the non-psych-ward-escapee variety); slippery sidewalks and elevator malfunctions, building code violations and carbon monoxide leaks. More people are killed by vending machines than terrorists, to say nothing of turkey-related Thanksgiving disasters. Meat can be cooked improperly, exotic allergies can emerge without warning. You can forget to wear your seatbelt (thanks for the tip, Dad), run with scissors, step out of the shower without a mat, fall on the treadmill (unlikely), or trip into the orchestra pit at the end of your set (better odds). Two years ago, Richie's doctor told him his cholesterol levels were so miserable they merited 'full nutritional and life-style intervention', that his thyroid was whacky, and that his family history put him in the high-risk category for heart attacks. He hasn't had an update on the situation since but, at his age, its probably all downhill from here. There's all the smoking Richie did as a young man, the post-apocalyptic state of his drug-abused liver, and the fact his diet only satisfies the top tier of the food pyramid. Your Honor, I have never seen that vegetable in my life. 

( _'You are a pitiful excuse for a human being.' Eddie had 'tsk'ed, checking Richie over after he 'resolved the differences' between himself and Henry Bowers with an ax.  
'Because I killed a guy?' Tozier asked, words slipping out only because he himself was still so stunned.   
'No, because you clearly have an iron deficiency and your heart rate is way higher than it should be for justifiable homicide.'_) 

Even more careless than usual, Richie 'Dick Joke' Tozier bobs along through the gray water current of LA's entertainment industry, kept from sinking only by the valiant efforts of Steve (and everyone else invested in the success of his comedic 'brand') and that deep-seated Trashmouth need to please people. In his own weird way, he's the mechanized toy monkey, desperately pounding out the William Tell Overture on those stupid little cymbals because he knows its the only thing he has to offer. If you already know they're going to laugh at you, you may as well make them think it was all your idea.

Richie shows up for meetings and gives his PR people a flimsy, sanitized version of his 'lost weekend', which Bill drafted out on a diner napkin. The Derry Police had carted away Bower's body with only the most perfunctory of questions, after which the entire town had become overwhelmingly occupied with the sudden collapse of the standpipe and several other sites of 'historical interest'. Further more, according to the good citizens of that perfectly interchangeable Smalltown, USA, there hadn't been a house standing at 29 Neibolt Street for almost thirty years. Municipal records even showed that everything on the property and the adjacent lots had been bulldozed in the mid-90's for some strip-mall project that fell through. (The materialization of actual, physical documentation contradicting everyone's memory _and_ several photographs seemed to really get under Mike's skin. A weird point to balk at given the whole ball of wax, Richie thinks, but maybe its just a librarian thing.) 

While Tozier's delivery of the agreed-upon narrative is only slightly less dead-eyed than the spiel the Losers received from Derry authorities, he suspects there is an air of precariousness around him that has discouraged questions from even the most hardened LA bullshit detectors. He comes out to Steve (promptly excusing himself to vomit), listens to bluster intended to delay and mitigate the inventible social media pile-on with an apathy his manager mistakes for newfound patience, and meets with his 'creative team' about incorporating more of his own material into the act. It is, he points out, how he clawed his way up from the bottom, before the pills and self-loathing and crippling fear of failure dug in with their sick and thorny roots. He occasionally loses his shit, but with no more intensity or frequency than before he choked on stage. A lot of it feels performative, in fact; he knows he should be offended, angry at being coerced into compromise after decades in the closet, but he sees the situation as though he's standing outside of himself. He can't seem to get _invested_ in the drama playing out before him and, anyway, he's just a spectator in the life of pre-Derry Richie. He's phoning in a role for someone who, without their memories, was never real or valid. 

( _He thinks a lot about their first visit to that skeletal house, where the sunflowers clustered paradoxically lush amidst the dead grass, watching as keenly as the groundlings in a bloody colosseum. About the little Richie mannequin in its coffin, sad and tawdry ventriloquist dummy. There's something inherently nasty in the mere concept of those things; the dead eyes and the mocking grooves about a mouth only half-capable of aping speech, the vulgar poetry of being manipulated by someone who has their hand up your ass.  
That's our Trashmouth. Wind him up and watch him go!_)

Four weeks, five. Bill and Bev have both filed for divorce; his amicable, hers… not so much. Mike is making his way to Florida via Colorado ('Geeze, Homeschool, even I'm not that bad at geography!') while Ben is doing what Ben does best-- patiently waiting for Beverly, besotted and clearly thrilled to finally subsist on more than lost memories and affection scattered like crumbs across the Loser's duck pond. 

( _I just want to be in your orbit, you understand. I see the demands others make of you, pushing and pulling and parasite-parenting-- smother-mothering-- you into something that will be small enough to hide away. The princess in her tenement tower, the china boy on his shelf. They don't understand that you are a great incandescence, a burning mass exerting gravity so profound inspires sophomorically honest poetry and contrived moments of sweaty intimacy, and even these very thoughts, which I automatically disclaim._ )

Patty Uris messages Richie to thank him for the generous donation he made to Audubon exotic bird sanctuary in lieu of flowers, and does not take umbrage at his useless offer to help with anything she might need, ever. Her voice, which has a calming cadence, poses a few gentle questions when they finally speak over the phone; she listens to no less than four ridiculous anecdotes, laughing honestly and never once calling attention to the fact Richie is sobbing into the phone. She fucking _thanks_ him for providing a thumbnail of Stan at such a young age, not mentioning the gap of decades, noting-- perhaps without meaning to-- that he had been a rather lonely young man when she met him. She would probably make a very good birdwatcher; patient, detailed-oriented, not given to spooking the wildlife with sudden movement.

Myra Kaspbrak is briefly featured on a local New York news broadcast, berating the Derry Police Department for their incompetence. It's not undeserved, even without mitigating memory-altering space-clown circumstances, but Richie has a hard time acknowledging her point while watching the few delicate trails of sheen overwhelm her water-proof mascara. (Damn the auto-play feature-- he'd meant to glance at the article, not subject himself to _that_.) Being an ugly-crier himself, he just doesn't trust people who can be composed and tearful at the same time. He doesn't trust _himself_ to look at Myra without letting her be eclipsed by Sonia and all the little neuroses witnessed with increasing discomfort throughout his childhood. Mrs. K 2.0 creates a Facebook page to raise awareness about her missing husband, describing a man who bears so little resemblance to Eddie that Richie has to violently empty his stomach again-- a difficult task while suppressing hysteria-laced laughter. It's not that he thinks

( _You never knew him; I heard him on the phone with you, the roar of your bull-dozer voice-- so carefully modulated for the TV interview!-- perfectly audible from the other end of the hall. He told Mike he couldn't turn off his cell because you would panic immediately, that you tracked him via Google GPS and would call him if he deviated from routine on the commute home._ )

he somehow miraculously intuited every aspect of Spaghedward All-Grown-Up in a few sleepless days, but he also knows that none of the Losers changed at their core. 'The child is the father to the man,' Rabbi Uris used to say, usually while dubiously eyeing his own son. Eds _liked_ to run, hence the physique that had Richie drooling into his General Tsao's chicken. He was a spitfire, tiny but mighty, not 'an obliging and peaceable soul'. (What does that even _mean_?) Oh, and Ghost-of-Sonias-Past? He fucking _hated_ the song 'My Way', to say nothing of 'Wind Beneath My Wings'. 

( _'Let's talk about the about the wind beneath your mom, Eds. I mean, she just lets 'em rip right in the middle of--'  
Eddie's red-faced scream of rage had been a thing of beauty; he'd dunked Richie in the quarry that day, taking him by the neck and shaking him until those too-big teeth rattled. Because Kaspbrak didn't have a truly violent bone in his body, Richie had searched in vain for bruises when he got home, forced instead to make do with the memory of the strength in those deceptively small hands and how their noses had almost touched when he'd surfaced for air._)

Richie spends more time than he ought to (namely, _any_ ) going through the 'Find My Eddie!' page, mostly because the bullshit is peppered with pictures of the man in question and Tozier is now beyond reigning a lasso around either his inner creeper or his inner masochist. (There is sleep-worn gray t-shirt in his possession that will never fit him. He doesn't try to put it on, or sleep with it, or press his face against it. It simply sits on his nightstand, the only neatly folded thing in the entire room.) Yet the Eddie in all of those photos looks so vaguely pinched, so tensed against myriad hovering social calamities, that Richie only does a complete scroll-through once or twice.   
Looking for traces of his Eddie behind Myra's Eddie is exhausting, and ultimately unfair. He doesn't think after all, in the dark watches of the night, that Eddie would have had an easy time finding the Loser's Richie in the Tozier-shadow that roamed the comedy circuit during the Great Derry intermission.

( _But he knew-- be still my plaque-clogged arteries!-- that Richie no longer wrote his own material. The vindication in his voice is something Tozier wanted to clutch at, bathe in, roll around in like a dog._ )

Coincidentally, or perhaps in one of those flashes of _knowing_ the Losers sometimes get about one another, Mike chooses this time to send Richie a cautious private text. Like everyone save Ben, Hanlon's phone did not survive the trip down the cistern, but even a small-town librarian can afford a decent data plan if he budgets wisely. Everything backed up to the Cloud, including a series of photos taken at the Jade Orient before the all-singing, all-dancing fortune cookie finale. Mike didn't want to share them without warning but there is one he particularly thinks Richie might like to see. Being _handled_ rankles, no matter how gently or well-intentioned. Richie is about five seconds away from sending an incredibly inappropriate response insisting he stipulated 'no pictures for the official Losers' orgy', when something stops him. Not his better judgement (he doesn't _have_ any), but a curiosity seasoned with that streak of self-flagellation.   
All he types is, **yes**.

Mike sends four pictures to the group chat and one just to Tozier, a favor Richie appreciates so deeply he'll never actually be able to acknowledge it. The whole sequence is from their playful and rather inebriated attempt to get a group shot-- and they all turned out fairly well, despite the general rowdiness and the waitress' failing patience. _'No, wait, I blinked', 'No, that's my bad side', 'suck in that missing gut, Haystack!', 'Do you _have_ a bad side, Bev?'._ By the fourth picture, Eddie's already questionable tolerance was also wearing thin. Richie kept cracking jokes or pulling an 'Abercombie' pose just when everyone was arranged, illiciting snickers and inciting chaos all over again. In this final shot, Tozier has been caught in the process of reeling Eddie-- still just the right size!-- under his arm in one of those half-hug, half-noogies he's probably owed a patent on. The smaller man has an ineffectual hand on his assailant's wrist, body titled into the drawing motion rather than away, brow in full furrow. He has that particular species of smile Richie loves as much as he hates to have it so thoroughly catalogued-- a mixture of companionable affront and half-grudging amusement that conveys whole paragraphs about just what an eternal pain in the ass his friend truly is. Charming because its artless, memorable for the lick of playful savagery that runs beneath it like a vein of ore. Richie's bodily responsiveness might not be what it once was, at least when it comes to the trouser-Tozier, but the effect of that expression is like a spear lancing through time. Twelve, fluttering and indefinable feelings leaving sparkler-trails in the darkness just beneath conscious thought; fifteen, lust meeting with affection like combustive chemicals; forty, armed with only the haziest of recall and in no way prepared for this tiny khaki-clad dynamo. And the unmoored present, a loser who discovered too late that he still had something left to lose, sick with grasping desire. 

Eddie looks _happy_ in the photo, relaxed in a way he only ever seemed to be with the Losers, radically different from pale half-presence in the grieving Myra's carefully curated photo gallery. The gangly lummox beside him-- and Richie feels he is being objective here, perhaps even overly kind-- is the dictionary definition of 'besotted' and ought to be taken out and shot for the sake of his own damn dignity. _'Jee-zuz, asshole,'_ he snarls inwardly, actually hissing as though burned when the full effect of the tableau hits him. _'Wear a sign, put up a billboard, arrange a fucking Disney-soundtrack flash mob.'_ What has he ever wanted, since the first time he started pulling faces and making arm-pit farts so the boy who'd been bumped off the kindergarten slide wouldn't cry, save Edward Kaspbrak's attention? The other Losers at least appear to be in the moment, most of them posing or trying to get in position, Ben's hand hovering indecisively near Bev's shoulder. Eddie and Richie are

( _'--in your own little world, I swear to G-d!' Maggie Tozier declared on more than one occasion, hands on her hips at the top of the basement rec-room stairs. 'Ed_ward_, Rich_ard_-- for the fifth and final time, _dinner_!'_ )

in a sphere of their own making, not just ignoring the camera but negating it with their focus on each other.

Having been caught and photographed in positions far more compromising and exposed (especially from a legal standpoint), Richie is taken aback by how vulnerable the picture makes him feel. The prosecution would like to present exhibits A, B, C, and D, at which point we skip the jury trial because the defendant is clearly a big fat homo with a hard-on for his childhood friend. Bail is set at for-fucking-get about it. 

Could everyone see it the whole time? No, no, Richie would never have made it out of Derry in the first place; he would have wound up in a ditch as one of the non-clown-related but equally ignored fatalities. When the Losers were sophomores, one of the math teachers had put up a poster advertising an amateur 'Hell House'-- one of those 'Christian' alternatives for Halloween-- which read in part, _'Come see homosexuals burning for eternity! Crispy flamers face their sins!'_. Almost two decades into the twenty-first century and Tozier _still_ feels like twisted Men in Black emissaries are going to knock on his door and arrest him for violating some arcane 'masculinity' ordinance. Does Mike see it, Richie's secret-- is that why he sent the picture privately? Not out of consideration for Richie's grief, but in concern for his reputation?   
Wrong again, the sliver of logic left in his head maintains. He came out to the Losers first-- they care only in that they wish they could have been there for him sooner, in that he had to go so long believing no one would love him for who he is. ( _'Believe?'_ he doesn't say, faced with Bev's fiery indignation on his behalf and Ben's gentle but somewhat mystified encouragement. _'It's not about belief,'_ are the words he swallows in the silence after Bill's stuttered support, Mike's genuine appreciation of trust. _'I _know_ no one could ever love this mess.'_ )

All rational consideration aside, Richie spends a full thirty six hours perseverating himself into a twisted, sweaty mess. No wonder Steve and his assistant (or is it his assistant's assistant?) Sasha keep saying he's not ready to come out publicly. At last, he texts a simple 'thnx', expecting relief and finding its all out of stock. The anxiety that's been coiling so tightly, serpentine, gives way only to a sticky, viscous sort of grief that gets down in his throat and stays there, like a separate being.

In territorial response to this more recent (but oh, already so devastatingly well-known) occupant of Richie's gut, his self-loathing also rears its not inconsiderable head. It's a far more familiar entity, a parasite which must have evolved sometime during his childhood-- for surely people don't come out of the _womb_ feeling this way about themselves?-- and ceaselessly feeds without ever having the decency to finish the fucking job.

( _'No, it hasn't killed me yet-- even my tapeworm has commitment issues!'_ )

In that moment-- just a split nano-second, cross my heart-- Richie misses the decades he spent sleepwalking. His shoulders ache, his eyes burn; there's a burden in him that cardboard cutout schmuck would never have been able to comprehend let alone bear, and Tozier envies his past self's ignorance. Once upon a time, he'd thought the worst thing that had ever happened to him was getting clean. Not the fact, not the achievement-- which he holds onto, white-knuckled, the winning first grader afraid he'll suddenly be disqualified from the spelling bee-- but the _process_. The withdrawals, post-acute and otherwise, the endless dead-eyed march from hour to hour, day to day. The sick desire that chased any sense of accomplishment.   
( _hey, I should reward myself with… I think I've got a handle on it now, I deserve…_ )  
The way he'd yearned sometimes for the downers like a desert-dweller pursuing an oasis of particolored pills. He'd been forced to rediscover certain things: what it was like to spend a whole sixty minutes _not_ jonesing with every fiber of his being, how to laugh and feel genuine pleasure while doing so (all that dopamine your body stopped producing), how to eat without calculating whether or not having food on your stomach would interfere with your high. There was that second adolescence, renewing relations with his right hand. Richie now has a profound personal credo: any time you're more interested in a fix than your dick, you've got a problem.

The sad truth is, his struggle with addiction (and that never stops sounding canned, PSA-pastel in a way that denies the sweat and vomit and the fact you couldn't for one moment longer stand your own smell) is probably the defining experience of his non-Derry life. It's a hurt he's used to carrying with him, the phantom ache of an old war injury now eclipsed by fresh hurts and the resurrection of old wounds going gangrene. He remembers nothing from the Deadlights-- his mind shies away, closes up like a frightened sea-anemone-- but he thinks that is probably what those eons-protracted moments were like. A glimpse back into his own personal hell, framed like some cannibal's pièce de résistance in a sprawl of time and space which insisted that anything loved or won or achieved or remembered was ultimately meaningless within that infinite No-Thing.

He wants to be free of it, free of IT, and so it comes one evening that he has a beat-long wish for forgetfulness that ultimately has him draped over his high-tech, auto-warming bathroom throne. 

( _I don't mean that, don't them them, don't take **him**. G-d, fate, Turtle, tiny Napoleonic sadist with pruning sheers, _whatever_-- I didn't mean that. I don't want to forget again._)

Derry's particular spell of amnesia has been broken, though. All five remaining Losers have proof of that in abundance, but that doesn't stop Richie from spending the entire night hunched over some cheap, ancient hotel notepad, scribbling down every random fact and anecdote he can summon about the friends who have already been stolen from him once. Not even full sentences sometimes, just key words, one idea bleeding into another until he's barely lifting the pen from the page. 

( _Bev never painted her nails, but she sometimes did her toes-- funky tie-dye colors, itty-bitty fruits or flowers, abstract swirls like those Magic-Eye books. Bill once got not one but _two_ jelly beans stuck up his nose; one in each nostril, of course, all on an elementary school dare. The the midst of clubhouse repairs, Ben hit his thumb so hard that blood gathered under the nail and Eddie's fussing escalated to the point of taking polaroids every other day to make sure it really was fading. Stan could bake. His mom taught him how to make those really good Purim cookies, whatsisname's pockets, and he could tie sailor's knots. Had all the really complicated ones memorized. Stan the Man, always prepared, once accidentally set the lawn on fire proving to Richie that the magnifying-glass method worked outside of cartoons. Mike threw a mean fastball, switched off as a lefty for the most random of tasks, and had a prowess with loogeys that should have made him a legend. He secretly tutored Richie for an entire summer when Tozier was petrified he wouldn't qualify for the same AP math class Eddie was taking._

 _Eddie… 'Eddie, my love,' over and over again, teasing and obnoxious and true. The Spaghetti Man, good ol' Doctor K. Eddie loved comic books, loved sci-fi sorcery crap like He-Man and Thundercats. Then Ben and Mike turned him on to stuff like Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter, and it was all over. 'Scuse me, Bev and I will just wait outside during the Losers' Fucking Book Club'. He liked orange popsicles best but sometimes Richie deliberately brought him a cherry one for reasons he continues to hope were not perfectly obvious. Donatello was _his_ Ninja Turtle, no arguments; Richie, of course, was Michelangelo, which left Bill and Stan to fight over Leonardo because Stan said Raphael had a 'bad attitude'. And yes, Richie had a thing about Eddie's shorts-- guilty as charged, no defense offered-- but also about that mole on the back of his neck that played peekaboo under the hair at his nape, and the way he bit his lips bloody when he got himself really worked up. Having that boy's full attention was _transcendent_, leaving Tozier giddy and delighted and fucking terrified it all showed every time. Eddie snapped back twice as quickly as any other Loser, could identify the varying flavors of Richie's bullshit by whiff alone, but could also catch a thought and run with it. Bringing the plan together, after the twenty minute lecture on why it was a bad idea in the first place._ )

Do other people recall details from their childhood like this-- full-blast surround-sound, colors vibrant and saturated like Saturday morning cartoons? Or is it only because Richie had nothing for so long that these odds and ends  
( _one man's trashmouth is another man's treasure_ )  
now pop up fresh as though from Tupperware tombs?

The panic subsides, eventually. Richie believes, save in the darkest watches of the night, that the Forgetting is over. That's something else that's new, a capacity for belief. Not faith-- never that!-- but a sort of resigned understanding that the world is not what it pretends to be. He doesn't seek out these anomalies, these artifacts of 'high strangeness' (apparently the term 'paranormal' is now passé). Not like Mike, who seems to circle back to cosmological shit no matter how far he physically roams. His steady stream of photos shared in the group chat is occasionally punctuated by images from Roanoke, Choco Canyon, Serpent Mound, and the Winnemucca Petroglyphs. Ramblin' Hanlon seems to have made quite a few internet pals during his time as lighthouse keeper, stretching all the way back to the Usenet days. People who curate collections of odd books and odder _tchotchkes_ , who gaze into spheres of darkened crystal or have equipment to photograph your aura for the low, low price of $29.99. The resulting present day meet-ups run the gambit from mortifying to silly to… something _else_. Richie can always tell when it's the latter because Mike's stated intention to meet so-and-so, expert in the Peyote Way/Gnosticism/Chaos Magick/Whatever (and the subsequent well-deserved roasting he receives from the other Losers) is never followed up by a whacky anecdote involving, say, vintage gas station memorabilia, an alien bobble-head, and a garden hose. Whatever passes between Mike and any genuine students of the occult he encounters is never shared, which suits Tozier just fine. Does Richie need or want an explanation for how a supposedly rational universe can accommodate   
( _'I am the Eater of Worlds!'_ )  
IT? Nope, hard pass.

* * *

Weeks accumulate to the point they must be counted as months-- three of them-- and it begins to dawn on Richie, in the same manner pain creakingly returns to frozen limbs, that the fundamental shifts of Derry may still be treating him to some pretty hefty aftershocks. For the first time in his adult life, his dreams are vivid and memorable-- nightmares, if you want to call a spade a spade. Never an easy sleeper, feeling the shrapnel-sharp remnants of Derry even after the skin of amnesia had closed around it, he'd managed to remain genuinely ignorant of the of the terrors conjured (or relived) by his somnolent mind. Only the tension remained upon waking, the gaping ache of _something_ missing, as elusive as that word ( _oh, come on, the whacha-ma-callit!_ ) that dances on the tip of your tongue. Those few lovers who did not subject Richie to the 'walk of shame' said he cried out, that he sounded like he was broken hearted or else being murdered. Tozier always shrugged it off, barely registering the criticism, and had eventually reached the level of success that allowed _him_ to have the bedroom high ground. _'No, I never remember my dreams, what do you _mean_ I led the neighbor dogs in a medley of howling last night? If you don't like it, there's the door.'_

He's never been **afraid** to sleep the way he has been since Derry had its (please, non-existent G-d) last off-Broadway hurrah. Upon returning to LA, he promptly discovered that the world behind his closed eyelids has become all too precarious-- a labyrinthian sewer to which the cistern subsystem beneath his hometown paled in comparison. Forget three doors with their inaccurately labeled degrees of 'scary'! This joint was designed by Escher, furnished by Lovecraft, with interior design consultation generously provided by John Wayne Gacy and Stephen Fucking King. 

IT was the embodiment of terror, the winner and still champion, no doubt about it. Yet, perhaps because IT feasted primarily on children for so long-- or perhaps because IT was ultimately alien to life and all its associated subtleties-- there was a lack of psychological finesse in all IT's guises. An atomic bomb needs no subtlety and, if Richie never experiences quite that level of visceral, sanity-blasting fear again, it will be too soon.   
All the same, there are tortures of which only the human mind is capable; unique evils it saves to turn on itself. 

Richie dreams of Eddie. No points for guessing that one-- it's as obvious as stating that water is wet, or that a Stud-of-the-Month calendar could actually just be twelve pages of Ben Hanscom. Tozier is pretty sure he dreamed of his Eds even through the long decades of unremembering. The sad fucking blow torch he's carried is at this point an integral part of his being. Everything Stephen Crane ever said about eating one's own heart  
( _because it  
\--because **he** , even in the smallest incidental sense of friendship--  
is mine_)  
with the added romanticism of an amputee who is also suffering from short-term memory loss, repeatedly facing the fresh horror of a lost limb.

He dreams of events that actually took place, their raw empiricism (such a Stanley word) enough to drive many a man mad. But his mind parades before him also fresh grotesqueries, customized and personalized and atomized like the most aggressive 21st Century add campaign. Water drips distantly throughout the night; he fumbles through collapsed tunnels until his fingers brush leather coated in moldering slime, flesh with too much waxy give, or remorseless bone. Or the dripping gets louder-- plink! plink!-- a fine stainless steel faucet not quite shut off, its 3/4 time providing stark contrast to the congealing, syncopated drops of blood on clean mosaic tile. He knows-- he _knows_ and no one will ever convince him otherwise-- that Stan folded his shirt and trousers neatly, that he wound his belt and paired his argyle socks before he did the Deed. 

Richie has never considered himself a particularly creative person, save in one highly specialized area; certainly he's not one to generate the level of detail in that phantom version of the Uris master bathroom. Leave that sort of hyper-descriptive baroque BS to Denborough, please and thank you. Comedy isn't particularly complex-- in Tozier's mind, its more about aim, about _finding_ the funny bone. The closest _he's_ ever gotten to sophistication is almost knocking over a bottle of Romanee Conti 1945 at some A-lister soiree.   
( _'And even then, you probably left a stain,' is Eddie's ghostly contribution._ )  
Some horror writer-- it may even have been Bill-- said something about the fear bone being more difficult to locate than the funny bone. Maybe yes, maybe no.

No, no, of course not. All Richie has to do is close his eyes to feel the clammy arachnid breath of pseudo-Stan's severed head, smell the rot-musk odor-- _'All my men wear English Leather…!'_ \-- that clung about the titan Bunyan monster. No need to do so much as that to see Eddie; Eddie in the flicker of too-bright shadows of neon-signage, rippling behind the fogged bathroom mirror, reflected in the oily dark of the dead flatscreen. Sometimes Tozier catches himself just staring off into space, distracted by some echo-glimmer in his own thoughts, coming back to a cup of cold ramen or a stream of prompting texts. Doleful brown eyes gaze at him in questioning horror above a gaping wound or with a species of apologetic yearning from the passenger seat of Mrs. K's junker. Eddie screams without breath to back it up, clutching Richie's jacket in the cavern-dark; he howls in full-throated terror amidst the dust, plaster, and animal-leavings of that quintessential haunted house. Always, in all ways, Richie repeats what was essentially his constant refrain, 'Look at me! Eddie, Eddie-- look at me!'   
They won't do it, neither the man nor the boy-- they stare fixedly past Richie without so much as an 'I fucked your mom'.

And yes-- yes, sometimes fear _is_ hard to find. The true fear, hidden without 'X' marks the spot, down at the bottom of the shit-pile where the groundwater swells to crack the foundations. The infant's vision of a pesky crow, the toddler's confused interpretation of the beast in his parent's bed as it grunts away in the dark. Betty Ripsom, drenched and dirty, jumping rope with only one shoe.

( _'You know how it goes, Richie. Sing it with me,' she says with half her jaw exposed, eyes glassy, maggots clustered above her lace collar like beads of a candy necklace. 'The worms go in…' She bounces awkwardly, not only because she is partly unshod, but because she'd missing several fingers from her left hand. Something's been at her-- IT, gnawing with what little George sometimes timorously referred to as 'big, big TEEF'._

_'The worms go out…' Her smile, what's left of it, is almost coy. There a gash clean through her cheek-- Paris dictates that is _the_ place for stab-wounds this fall!-- so putrescent that the remaining flesh has peeled back from dry and crumbling muscle. 'In your stomach…'_

_Richie pushes past her in his own oddly defined body. His existence is tenuous, uneven. He strides first with the gangly legs of an adult, complete with the occasional twinge in the right knee, then with the disproportionate ones of an aching prepubescent. Thirteen, sixteen, eleven, then the wrong side of forty again. He has no idea where this dream-jacking is taking him and Betty lets him pass, too busy gagging wetly and explosively on what he can only assume is a practical demonstration of the jingle's final line._

_'And out your mouth!' Patrick Hockstetter finishes for her, leaning causally against a corner lamppost. Tozier finds the terrain has righted, or at least solidified. He is three houses up from Eddie's, amidst the small but well-kept lawns of Maplewood Lane. He keeps walking-- that particular brisk pace they all used when attempting to unobtrusively scurry away from Bower's gang-- while Patrick shoves a skeletal hand ostentatiously down his own sopping jeans.  
'Ed-die! Oh, Eeeee-ddie!' the corpse-bully mocks, high-pitched and lisping. 'Eddie, my _love_!'_

_Here we go, Mr. Tozier-- your destination has been preselected, no need to touch the wheel. His subconscious mind conjures the scene with ease, down the the drawn and yellowing lace curtains (always pulled primly closed) and the cracked cement driveway. The neighborhood was a nice one, no more or less middle-class than Bills, Richie's, or Stan's, but there was always a faint sense of… invisible clutter around the Kaspbrak exterior, as if some oppression from the tchotchke-and-doily-laden rooms had bled through out onto the lawn. Frank Kaspbrak had _planned_ for his family, Mrs. K was always at pains to remind anyway who would listen. His widow did not have to raise their son 'across the tracks' like *some* people, she would remark with particular emphasis long after Beverly had moved to Portland. But, while Sonia spent freely in matters of health (or supposed lack thereof), she was tight-fisted in every other aspect of finance. Squeezed ol' Lincoln 'til he screamed. She distrusted handymen, moreover. They had sticky fingers and-- here she would eye Richie with some heavy but inchoate accusation-- _worse_. She had her Eddie-bear's safety to think about._

_Even dreaming, Richie shudders at the thought of that nickname, stomach cramping in chilling presentiment. And why not? It's his sick mind conjuring this sideshow. Shouldn't it already know how the whole shit-fest ends? He stands before the front door, new but already dirty-and-pinching sneakers tracking summer's dust onto the welcome mat. ('Good friends, good cheer'-- inaccurate, another warning.) His adult hand grips the knob without bothering to knock, his frame is adolescently unaligned as he crosses the threshold, assaulted by the scent of moldering sachets and furniture polish upon entry. The house is quiet, satisfied and self-contained in its typical gloom, vague animosity raised almost to the level of Neibolt's active malignancy. Racking up the offenses, Tozier does not take off his shoes, either. His body seems to be on an autopilot mission to the kitchen, rather than the haven of Eddie's room. He shouldn't be here. He isn't wanted here (was he ever?) amongst the worn out-of-the-box 'coziness', every porcelain cat and ancient copy of Soap Opera Digest arrayed against him._

_Mrs. Kaspbrak is in the kitchen, of course, turned away from the door in one of her shapeless house dresses, hair up in unapologetic pink curlers. She's working busily over something Richie can't quite see-- a lump under a stained tablecloth. At any rate, there were times she simply ignored Tozier's presence even when he was right in front of her. Anxiety already pitched to the point of pain, he discovers suddenly that the sound is back on, quickly rising in volume like the roar of an oncoming train. Richie registers the screaming first-- Eddie shrieking in the grips of pain and terror just as he had done in another kitchen, with his poor arm curled uselessly against his chest. Without thinking, Richie thrusts Sonia away, having crossed paths with greater horrors to reach Eddie's side. Mrs. K, snarling with all five thousand of Pennywise's spiked teeth, rears back and waves a needle the size of a whale harpoon menacingly above her head. She wastes no time screeching insults and accusations at the interloper, most of which fall on deaf ears._

__Eddie_ is her project, laid out on the kitchen table like a cadaver at the morgue. Digusting and yet somewhat predictable, the sort of psychological trope even Bill Denbrough wouldn't stoop to, but none of that lessens the chilling revulsion, the desire to somehow get Eddie _away_. Kaspbrak himself is an adult, all chiseled jaw, eternal doe eyes, and 5'9 (if you're being generous) of competent spitfire. Dowsed, of course, smothered beneath the pall of the Mommy Monster, staring up at Richie with a blood-laced 'o' of voiceless outcry and a gaze that begs his friend to make it **not true**. His chest has been split open by IT's claw but, instead of blood and innards, it's stuffing leaking out. Red-stained quilt batting, Eddie-bear guts, and sewer water that his mother has been attempting to sew back inside._

_'Look at what you've done!' Sonia rages, grabbing Richie by the hair at his neck and forcing the taller man down for an intimate view. 'You filthy fairy! You dirty, _dirty_ pervert! Mommy will fix things for her Eddie-bear, you can bet the bank on that, but I want you to _look_ at what you did to my poor, sweet son!'_

_'Rich-ie,' Eddie croaks, just as he had in IT's lair, before the dream-images dissolve into sweat-soaked reality and the cold porcelain already under Tozier's trembling hands._ )

* * *

It's like the goofy dam they'd gotten it in their heads to build down in the Barrens, Richie considers. A bunch of bored, careless sophomores; Ben with an idea and his typical engineering intuition, Mike with the enthusiasm and practical handiness to back it up. Bill supervised, working alongside Eddie, Richie, and a vocally dubious Stan. The dam, which looked more like someone's poor Modern Art pitch for an NEA grant, had been surprisingly effective. More so, in fact, than any of them had imagined. The arthritic creek backed up in short order, to the point it gained the notice of Public Works and nearly betrayed the clubhouse. Adroitly and without fanfare, Ben had removed a particular strut, letting the water flow forth with such power that the rest of the construction rapidly collapsed into an unfortunate but somewhat natural-looking pile of debris. Richie remembers whistling the Tetris theme briefly, having enjoyed the spectacle of destruction far more than the labor of creation. Just one piece and down she goes. Release the flood! In that same way, the barrier between Tozier's waking and sleeping mind has caved in. Ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between, we've got waters a-risin' like you ain't _never_ seen!

For all he'd once claimed to dream of Sonia Kaspbrak (transference much?), he's considering filing a nocturnal restraining order. He's kept his memories beyond the Derry city limits and he would not truly wish them away. He is privately but uncharacteristically contrite about that brief midnight thought, now secretly paranoid-- Pinnochio pinching himself to bruises to prove he's still a real boy. This is just the price he has to pay for it. So what if you think you've already shelled out  
( _too much; Stan's empty seat at the table, the rattle of Eddie's last breath that Richie wasn't around to hear_ )  
everything you've got? It's like getting the loan principal down to zero only to discover you never made a dent on the interest. Never the sort to be trusted with his own accounts-- he has, in fact, made his financial manager _cry_ \-- Tozier stops trying to sort debits from credits and decides sleep is for the weak. 

Richie can't avoid it entirely, but he can push it back, every light in the house blazing while his eyes get so heavy and gritty he can't see even _with_ his glasses on. He alarms Steve with his sudden exponential intake of Mountain Dew and 5 Hour Energy on top of the already ubiquitous Starbucks, then confuses the other man further with a sudden drive to exercise. 

"Is this some new fad diet?" Covall asks dubiously, eyeing Richie like he's considering ordering Holy Water off eBay and looking up a Jesuit on Yelp. "What's going on here? You look terrible!"

"You really know how to turn a gal's head," Richie drawls back, hating the little pause that has manifested after any and all appearances of the Southern Belle since his coming out. A little moment of 'gay panic' for his good ol' extremely straight pal Steve. It's insulting but also useful, effectively shutting down the discussion. Let Covall and 'the team' go back to wrangling over how to 'transition' (another tone-deaf word choice) Trashmouth's image. Richie has a date with his new home treadmill and recently installed rowing machine, both of which heartily kick his ass.

The horror show isn't a nightly affair, though the ravages of ill-advised amateur weightlifting sure are. Their visits are still frequent enough that Richie has begun to view his bed the same way most people approach trash compactors and industrial woodchippers. 'DO NOT OPERATE IF UNLICENSED'. He won't get near the thing unless he's absolutely exhausted-- aching and disoriented and almost nauseous with it. 

( _'I think Ms. Hollis is going to stop excusing you from class when you vomit. It's not even that impressive anymore! Jesus, Richie, think about your esophagus! No one should barf this much!'  
'Sorry, Spaghetti. Your mom just has that effect on me.'  
And older, striding determinedly up the stairway of Derry Townhouse in full, chandelier-shaking sermon mode, 'It's called delta wave sleep, dipshit! Stage 3 NREM-- *vital* to actually feel rested and to restore your glucose levels! Do you want to fight an evil sewer clown with unbalanced hormones and impaired cognition!?'_)

Finally, Richie breaks down and Googles it. Supposedly, a deficit over a few nights can cause the body to shorten other parts of the cycle to recoup the loss. So long, REM.

( _'Your theory is ridiculous and insupportable!' That was Stan, who probably vetoed more lines of scientific inquiry in his career as Tozier's lab partner than the entire Catholic Church. 'We are _not_ analyzing goose-poop for our project!'_ )

So maybe this particular theory doesn't have academic rigor, but there's  
( _no one_ )  
nothing to stop him from trying. He's aware that the other Losers are concerned about him-- likely more than they know and certainly more than he'd ever be willing to admit. If he runs silent too long, they check in on him, and just because they've worked out some sort of rotation doesn't make it any less obvious. There are plenty of FaceTime calls as well, but Richie has been cast as the one-liner 'goofy/awkward/stoner best friend' often to know how lighting can work for-- or against-- a fella. In the beginning, he had brunch with Denbrough every other weekend but, now that the lovely Miss Phillips has taken a sizable chunk of Hollywood with her in the divorce, Big Bill is across the pond working on a miniseries version of _Orchid Blue_ for the BBC. Ben and Bev, having finished their tropical reacquaintance cruise, are now ensconced somewhere in Connecticut. From there, Bev can confidently and safely commute to New York to dismantle both her business partnership and her marriage with a man each of the other Losers would cheerfully feed to Pennywise face-first. It would actually be _easier_ to find Waldo than it would be to pin down Mike Hanlon, which means the only people situated to catch Richie unprepared are the same people he's been feeding bullshit to for years.

There people-- writers, management, industry contacts-- are used to dealing with Richie Lite, and it's not as though most of them are beating down a path to his door. Occasionally, he's aware that there are feelers out there, parties curious as to whether or not the Trashmouth has become a genuine dumpster fire, but the majority are only hanging around for the popcorn. Steve and the writers-- a plural personality if ever there was one-- are the only agencies invested in a true comeback, Tozier himself included. What was hard to care about before is only harder still (har-dee-har). Events seem unreal, garish Crayola over and outside the crisp black lines, especially when your first sixty minutes of true sleep  
( _delta wave quality, baby_ )  
are interrupted by the sudden, powerful conviction that something with a ponderous shell has settled itself firmly on your chest. Even when he remembers nothing, wakes only to the pounding of his pulse in his ears, Richie knows the absence of imagery does not exclude having dreamed.

( _'Deadlights ate 'em,' Georgie seems to whisper sagely from the past, with the same solemnity he used when asking the older boys if he could play.  
Or Richie _thinks_ he's swimming towards consciousness, replete with peace and satisfaction, aware only of strong arms holding him and some faintly irritating squelching noise in the distance.  
'Shhh, Richie,' Eddie murmurs absently, loose-skinned fingers trailing wetly through Tozier's hair. 'Shh. It's only the worms.'  
That last time, he did wake up screaming. Sorrowful, frightened, and-- beyond the heavy guilt and discomfort-- perhaps a little aroused._) 

By the time the Losers start broaching the topic of a Thanksgiving reunion, Richie is getting three sporadic hours at most, usually in the middle of the day. Steve has him set up at a small venue for a sort of test run. Something intimate to get a feel for audience reaction to the new material, much of which has been reworked so many times it might as well not be Richie's at all. Which is probably the point. Numb, buzzed with an alertness that comes from having completely fucked his circadian rhythms, Tozier peers past the curtain at the nightclub's audience with a concentration that seems to surprise his manager, especially since the stage lights make all but the vaguest sense of the crowd difficult to discern.

"You okay there, buddy?" Steve asks, hovering and pointedly not offering Richie anything he can regurgitate ten minutes later on stage. 

"Oh yeah," the comedian responds, barely paying attention as he blithely lies. This isn't the first time he's experienced this particular side-effect of sleeplessness (Google is no help in _this_ instance), but this is the longest its ever lasted. "Super."

"You sure?" The whole world feels like a heat shimmer at the height of summer, and Richie's brain is the blacktop.

"Yeah," Richie repeats, wondering what Covall would say if he told him what the audience really looks like. "I can see the end of the rainbow."

"That's the spirit!" It sounds too cheerful, but he does get an actual thump on the shoulder for it. "Pot of gold's right there!"

Beyond the glare of the footlights, Richie does in fact see an array of colors. Purple, maroon, marigold; grass-green, topaz, and neon ice-cream blue. Seventy five or so unique shades, each enveloping a particular patron, brightening like halos near the head.   
Above each and every one of them, matching ribbons of spectral hues extend for varying lengths into the empty air, like a forest of balloons. 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [+] The other King novel being 'spoiled' is _Insomnia_ (1994). Obvious statement is, after that last paragraph, kinda... obvious.   
> [+] Richie is thinking of _hamantaschen_ , 'Haman's Pockets', a triangular-shaped cookie served during Purim. They taste a little like shortbread and come with different fillings, cherry being my personal favorite. ;-)  
> [+] Romanee Conti 1945- I'm not a wine person, but a single bottle of this was apparently auctioned off at $496,000, so… *chokes*
> 
> As always, any time you could take leave kudos or comment would be greatly appreciated. Even if it's just to tell me what sort of trouble Mike got into with the alien bobble-head. ;-)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Thomas De Quincey's Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow:  
> [Our Lady of Darkness] _carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all._
> 
> Kudos, comments, and questions about my mental health are always appreciated. (Though the latter are likely unanswerable. ^_~) Feedback serves the Beam.


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